Falcon Forecast: A Better way to serve clients;

              ' . . . F A L C O N /
FORECAST is
making a significant
contribution to our
overall practice-development
effort.'
During the past twelve months, practice offices
throughout the Firm have taken at least seventy-five
new FALCON and FORECAST engagements
on the strength of about two hundred presentations.
This is the result of an effort launched last fall to
introduce our computer services, particularly the
FALCON/FORECAST system, to potential users
across the country. Coordinated by EO partners
Jule Phoenix, Al Pastino and Paul Stevens, the
program offers companies computer-based tools
which can help them plan for the future and make
more profitable business decisions.
H&S has worked with clients on financial
planning and reporting almost since the inception
of the Firm. Of course, early financial information
systems were all manual. Several years ago,
however, we began exploring computer-based
solutions for clients' problems. During this process
and during routine audit work, we reached certain
conclusions that eventually led to the development
of the FALCON/FORECAST system as well as
other computer services.
The idea for FALCON (which stands for
FinanciAL CQA/solidation and Reporting) was the
inspiration of Paul Stevens, who is based in Los
Angeles. He, Los Angeles manager Barbara Harvey
and former manager Ken Bitticks were largely
responsible for beginning its development early
in 1970.
In talking with clients in the Los Angeles area
to learn how they were handling their financial-reporting
requirements and what they would find
useful, Paul realized that company executives
needed a generalized system of computer programs
that was highly flexible—one that could produce
financial and operating reports quickly and
efficiently at departmental, divisional or corporate
levels and one that could be changed without
difficulty, responding to management's needs as a
company regrouped or added subsidiaries or more
product lines. He believed there was a real demand
for a system that (1) could be operated easily by
financial personnel with no particular computer
expertise, (2) required no heavy investment in
computer programming or hardware and
(3) contained automatic controls to maintain
accounting integrity. Once this approach was
established, Paul, Barbara and Ken began work
on the project.
f\ \ he Financial Consolidation and Reporting
System that resulted uses the General
Electric Mark III network. Information
can be entered directly into the computer
system from more than 300 cities in the
United States and from major locations in Canada,
Europe, Japan and Australia. A l that is needed
to operate the system is a computer terminal. The
user can enter data, give instructions and call
for reports by typing commands in English, and no
computer programming is required.
FALCON was designed to provide valuable
management information from basic accounting
and statistical data and to ensure that a company's
accounting and financial personnel can be easily
trained by H&S to operate it themselves. In addition,
the system was designed to be flexible enough to
be changed by accountants. This accounting orien­tation
provides numerous automatic-control
features, such as a record of all adjustment and
elimination entries as an audit trail, which help
assure the accuracy of information and speed the
availability of dependable, customized manage­ment
reports.
FALCON automatically consolidates historical,
budgeted and projected data entered into the
system from a company's various reporting loca­tions.
It can handle a consolidation of virtually any
size at any level within the business structure.
Thus, the system can serve a wide range of com­panies,
both large and small, in a variety of
industries. FALCON performs consolidations so
efficiently that this task can be done routinely
on a monthly basis.
The final products of our Financial Consolidation
and Reporting System are the analytical and
management reports—these are produced easily*
and rapidly. (A report format generally requires
just a few hours to code.) These statements can be
prepared with different levels of detail, and execu­tives
can design their own, specifying the content,
format and calculations they want. Typical of these
are balance sheets; income and retained-earnings
statements and statements of changes in financial
position or operating data; reports comparing
present financial and operating data with those
of prior periods or comparing information for
different companies, market areas or product lines;
quarterly reports to stockholders; and special
reports analyzing items such as earnings per share,
depreciation, investment or inventory.